My Grandmother's
Christmas
Among my unforgettable Christmas memories are
those from 2007. Yuletide found me that year at my mother's home
near Charlottesville, Virginia. We went to Christmas Eve service at
an Episcopal parish church once frequented by the rather heterodox Thomas Jefferson
and enjoyed a Christmas Day pot roast dinner prepared by my mother over glasses
of red wine. My mother (and I, for that matter), though, has adopted
a somewhat stripped down approach to Christmas, foreswearing the usual full
panoply of decorating. We tend to practice what might be called
"herd festivity," simply enjoying seasonal decorations and
celebrations around us, without contributing our own.
Among all the presents, eating, and family
gatherings, Christmas Day is best for simple relaxation. That 2007
Christmas evening, after dinner with my mother, I settled down to watch a
television movie when my mother answered the telephone and called me to the
kitchen. Out of the receiver came the voice of my older
brother. With a somber voice, he reported that my last surviving
grandparent, my paternal grandmother, had died about an hour earlier in her
home. Her will expressly called for her body to be cremated and the
ashes to be interred next to her husband and my father's brother in a family
cemetery plot, in a simple ceremony, without a funeral service. This
surprised my brother, given her love of her nearby Disciples of Christ church,
but I suggested that she was simply acting in a modest, practical manner.
The death of my grandmother was by itself not a
surprise. During my last visit with her on Thanksgiving morning,
short-term memory loss led her to repeatedly ask me questions such as whether I
had eaten (I had) while her attending nurse fixed a small
breakfast. Perhaps this loss of awareness prevented my grandmother
from noticing the mailing of my dissertation a few months
previously. Despite her professed ignorance to my inquiry, a quick
living room search revealed a bound copy on a shelf.
This found dissertation became the highlight of
her Thanksgiving. My grandmother proudly exhibited the
dissertation's 850-page heft, although she doubted whether she would ever read
it. Particularly pleasing to my grandmother was my full name, Andrew
Earl Harrod, emblazoned on the title page. My grandmother always
thought that Earl was "such a good name." It was her
husband's, and I am his namesake.
Thus, the numbering of
my grandmother's days was evident to all as she tried to meet her last 95th
birthday on January 22, 2008. My brother's telephone conversations
that year reported that she was in pain without, and tending to fall asleep
with, medication. My pediatrician father, meanwhile, traveled at the
end of November to oversee his mother's care. On Christmas Day he
was dining out when the final moments came. As my brother reported,
my grandmother awoke with her heart failing, called for the nurse to hold her,
and breathed her last.
To my brother grieving on the telephone, I
responded simply by saying, "Today is a day of new
life." With perhaps some license with regard to Jesus's actual
birthday, Christmas celebrates divine light piercing a fallen world's darkness,
turning the Northern Hemisphere's bleak midwinter into a time of holiday
cheer. For believers, the birth of Jesus holds forth the prospect of
an open tomb on the other side of this world's crosses, of humanity returning
to an original uncorrupted state before God's face. Man's inevitable
rendezvous with eternity need not end in meaninglessness and
despair. As Jesus in the Gospel of John (10:10)
declares, "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the
full." Thus Southern Baptist
Convention President Frank Page
declared in In God's Name, "when you read in the newspaper that
Frank Paige has died, don't believe it, because at that moment...I will be more
alive than I ever have been."
This true gift of Christmas comes as undeserved
grace, announced by angels to shepherds and leading magi to worship a Messiah
in a manger. This Emmanuel, or "God is with us," of
the Bible seeks a personal relationship with everyone, no matter how
lowly. Christianity's Good News
of the Messiah, foretold in the faith of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob, continues to liberate the world. Missionaries
traveling Roman roads overcame a brutal empire's belief in divine Caesars, and
Christmas evergreens remind Gentiles that many of their pagan ancestors
worshiped trees. The seed that died in Jerusalem brought forth a
bountiful fruit indeed.
For my grandmother, I pray that she now rests in
peace with her husband and younger son, my uncle, who died of cancer as a
teenager before my birth. I think of my grandmother's black poodle
and childhood playmate, Buttons, with her as well. Someday I will
join them.
How did she pass from one life to the
next? Chariots of fire swinging low appear to me -- or perhaps Saint
Nicholas on special assignment with his reindeer and
sleigh. "Where, O Death, is your victory?" asks Apostle
Paul (1 Corinthians
15:55). "Farewell to Shadowlands," proclaims C. S. Lewis in The Last Battle. Pax.
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